HOW (AND WHY) I BECAME A NARRATIVE-NONFICTION AUTHOR

It was 2004. I was forty-five years old. During most of my 20s and 30s I had written several novels(unpublished and mostly unfinished.) In 2001 I became a city of Charleston tour guide and began to immerse myself in the city’s history, reading almost every book written about Charleston. Some were entertaining, most were factual and many were often boring. I began to compile my favorite tidbits from all these books and other sources. You know: prominent powerful gentleman gets caught in a compromising circumstance; cross-dressing socialite throws a debutante ball for two chihuahuas; a whorehouse operates out of a service station (from the back seat of a car on a lift) in the middle of the historic district – kind of like an antebellum TMZ.

One day, a fellow tour guide was reading through my computer notes and asked, “How many pages of this stuff do you have?” I looked. It was about 50,000 words. He suggested, “You ought to write a book.”

My goal with the Wicked books was to write a “good parts” version of Charleston history. I took inspiration from one of my favorite novels of all time by one of the best writers of the past 50 years, William Goldman’s 1973 classic, The Princess ride. Those who are familiar with the novel (as opposed to those only familiar with the equally classic movie based on the novel) know that Goldman’s novel was the “good parts” version of a rather turgid old-fashioned satirical romance written by someone named S. Morgenstern. Of course, none of that was true. It was nothing more than an ingenious literary device created by Goldman.